Doranchak, good to see that you are still interested in transposition and working on it.

EDIT: See page 76 for a re-do of the analysis with an updated spreadsheet.

I skipped two symbols to see what would happen. Here is the tracing map.

And here are the results with only ten trial messages. Blue suggests that the columns are from left to right, red from right to left. All are from left to right.

EDIT: I used the original transposition scheme by accident. I have to do it all over again.

Not sure you will understand me Smokie.. I was on the two position skip as well. but 19 is a two position skip + a full row tacked on the back of the preceding row pushing around and around and around. I’m on holidays and for some reason the Blue Pacific Ocean warm sun and white sands keep calling me taking up my time.

Happy new year everyone!

UPDATE: The problem doesn’t happen when I run the 32 bit binary instead of the 64 bit binary.

That’s odd, I will take a look asap.

Smokie can you make one of these spreadsheets and turn it into a Scytale 19 ROWS so I can see what it does.. Most of this is just made up 19 so I can follow.. Just do random stuff. The block of 19s at the bottom right is right.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everybody!

Mr. Lowe, I am planning on re-tooling my spreadsheets so the the message is in rows. In the meantime, I have to re-do my scytale column left or right analysis because originally I encoded the message before transposing. I want to transpose before encoding so that it is more comparable to the 340.

Have you played around with any of the solver programs on your new Lenovo yet? Here is a scytale message for you just like we think that the 340 may be. Except of course, it WILL solve. The period is 19 and I am including a list of the repeats for you. Copy and paste into a spreadsheet, and color the repeats on the spreadsheet. Or print it, cut strips of paper, tape them together and use your highlighters to make the repeats line up vertically. Whatever works for you. But then write the symbols out in rows in your spreadsheet and work on putting the message into a solver.

Smokie21:

51 21 50 45 51 12 13 31 54 32 13 56 53 22 59 39 15
62 7 25 16 12 26 1 8 54 57 49 40 2 33 26 13 3
55 4 1 14 32 7 15 35 50 26 3 51 26 36 46 9 31
10 62 23 47 37 17 1 4 54 19 6 38 32 53 11 20 1
5 8 2 51 16 41 9 56 50 50 24 54 3 54 33 12 13
14 35 16 1 48 34 7 18 16 31 11 52 12 21 36 21 37
45 60 49 9 29 59 30 42 3 55 38 60 46 32 32 46 8
13 1 14 3 54 55 16 35 4 58 50 23 28 3 16 15 27
39 32 59 48 9 31 36 24 43 52 53 13 53 14 40 32 60
1 20 57 15 25 45 2 33 26 16 55 41 5 10 32 17 61
30 6 37 22 20 51 38 42 31 51 19 7 5 22 3 52 15
39 16 1 32 11 53 23 59 8 60 41 27 24 1 56 14 62
23 22 46 9 32 41 22 50 54 15 42 24 36 55 52 36 47
34 49 25 16 12 53 39 49 13 18 21 45 59 42 20 60 41
8 37 44 26 49 22 51 24 38 14 7 31 15 16 50 56 54
3 17 32 27 30 33 59 2 55 12 19 45 41 27 52 43 39
50 24 51 53 13 38 14 1 4 11 5 44 54 55 56 7 46
34 18 15 16 52 22 51 20 12 50 31 36 62 13 22 41 33
30 14 1 53 51 41 23 15 60 56 43 3 30 42 8 1 16
54 9 12 13 6 24 7 56 14 62 39 37 55 34 55 17 2

left rgt
sym sym
54 21
60 3
16 7
32 15
1 50
13 10
43 55
52 23
49 26
36 20
33 9
56 33
19 54
55 5
36 8
16 43
14 17
55 23
52 41
23 14
53 24
3 62
41 56
24 12
54 24
1 37
8 32
22 13
24 16
15 51
22 16
3 32

When you are ready to solve, the first row should read like this:

51 25 32 1 50 11 46 16 60 6 32 41 49 14 45 55 41

Smokie.. The Lenovo is still in its box.. I’ll get the techies at work to fire it up . I’m away on holidays.. I’ll give the above a go on the iPad. Thanks and have a safe new year
Cheers to all

To all the contributers,

I’m engaged in discussion with Nick Pelling on his 340 hypothesis and various interesting observations (I explained the transposition thing). I’ve also spoken against Dan Olson’s hypothesis and that I believe it is partially incorrect.

http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2015/06/ … ng-opinion

Basicly Nick Pelling thoughts are that the "+" symbol could be a meta token, so that for each double letter "tt" the second letter is replaced with a "+". So "tt" becomes "t+", "ll" becomes "l+". As you know we did allot of work in this direction earlier in 2015 with some very good contributions from daikon and smokie treats in this regard. I’ve shown to Nick that it is very unlikely that a single disrupting symbol is the cause of the 340 not solving all this year.

I’ve also said:

If you like, you can create a test cipher yourself that meets your demands and I’ll share it with the researchers at morf13’s site and we’ll have a go at it.

And he responded:

May I take you up on the offer?

Generally speaking, I think there is good reason to think that the Z340’s system ‘reboots’ at line 11 with a different set of homophonic assignments (I read the lack of repeats in 1-3 and 11-13 as indicating this), which would make the Z340 actually a two-part cryptogram: sad as it is, I currently see nothing but disappointment for people trying to solve Z340 as a single homogenous block of cipher.

I’m also very much taken by Dave Oranchak’s [l*M] [l*M] [l*M] lM [l*M] [l*M] [l*M] homophone-like sequence, but remain suspicious about lines #10 and lines #20. So, could I possibly ask you to test three specific scenarios for me:-

Scenario A: Z340, top half, no line #10, homophone cycle [l*M] assumed, + is repeat meta-token, i.e.
(1) Z340, lines #1 to #9 only
(2) Replace all occurrences of l * and M with a single token (say, ‘M’)
(3) Replace all occurrences of ‘+’ with the preceding token

…and…

Scenario B: Z340, top half, no line #10, homophone cycle [l*M] assumed, + is unknown meta-token, i.e.
(1) Z340, lines #1 to #9 only
(2) Replace all occurrences of l * and M with a single token (say, ‘M’)
(3) Replace each occurrence of ‘+’ with a new token unique to that position

…and finally…

Scenario C: Z340, top half, no line #10, homophone cycle [l*M] assumed, + is null, i.e.
(1) Z340, lines #1 to #9 only
(2) Replace all occurrences of l * and M with a single token (say, ‘M’)
(3) Completely remove all occurrences of +

I completely realise that the resulting ciphertext in all three cases isn’t really long enough to stand a huge chance of decryption, but I’m just wondering if we can tell from the results which of these three meta-patterns the + character seems to work best with. Can you please give this a go, and let me know what (if anything) emerges?

I will work on this, any help is appreciated and what do you guys think?

.
He is talking about accumulated symbol count in rows 1-3 and rows 11-13, merging I, * and M because they are in a three symbol cycle that runs ( perfectly? ) throughout, and saying that the + is polyalphabetic.

Because there are 63 symbols, I am pretty sure that you could compare lines 6-9 and lines 16-18 ( or any other pair of three rows ) and the message would seem to reboot. I would have to go back through all of my spreadsheets, but I checked this a long time ago before joining the site. I think that I have some graphs and stuff to show what happens, but I could also easily do it again.

Merging one cycle that we aren’t even sure is true is not going to help the solver, and we have expanded the + symbol into 24 individual symbols. But go ahead and try, perhaps it will lead to a new idea. I have plenty of them myself that didn’t work.

I looked at this site and he refutes the idea of transposition. Other people do as well. EDIT: It is very difficult to make a 63 symbol message that is not a transposition scheme but also has such a high number of period 19 ( or another high period ) repeats. Transposition is a classical way of making a coded message, has been around for thousands of years, and is probably in all basic cryptography books. And the statistics strongly suggest transposition. Just because we can’t as of yet figure out the exact scheme doesn’t mean that it isn’t a transposition.

mI gniog ot tsuj ssot siht aedi tuo ereh, dna i ma erus uoy lla era erawa fo ti tub siht saw desu ni a eop rehpic

-krulg

Here are the strings that Nick is considering.

Scenario A:

HER>pM^VPk|1LTG2d
NppB(#O%DWY.<MKf)
By:cMMUZGW()L#zHJ
Spp7^M8MV3pOOORK2
_9MMztjd|5FPP&4k/
p8R^FMO-MdCkF>2D(
#55Kq%;2UcXGV.zL|
(G2Jfj#OO_NYzz@L9
d<MMbbZR2FBcyA64K


Scenario B:

HER>pM^VPk|1LTG2d
Np+B(#O%DWY.<MKf)
By:cM"UZGW()L#zHJ
Spp7^M8MV3pO$'RK2
_9M*ztjd|5FP,&4k/
p8R^FMO-MdCkF>2D(
#50Kq%;2UcXGV.zL|
(G2Jfj#O=_NYz?@L9
d<MIbQZR2FBcyA64K


Scenario C:

HER>pM^VPk|1LTG2d
NpB(#O%DWY.<MKf)B
y:cMUZGW()L#zHJSp
p7^M8MV3pORK2_9Mz
tjd|5FP&4k/p8R^FM
O-MdCkF>2D(#5Kq%;
2UcXGV.zL|(G2Jfj#
O_NYz@L9d<MbZR2FB
cyA64K

mI gniog ot tsuj ssot siht aedi tuo ereh, dna i ma erus uoy lla era erawa fo ti tub siht saw desu ni a eop rehpic

-krulg

It’s a good idea, thanks. I will work on a set of n-grams to accommodate.

.
I had to re-tool my scytale spreadsheet to make a better analysis which attempts to find whether the columns should read from left to right or from right to left. There is still a minor problem at the bottom right corner. If it was a scytale, then column 18 should have 18 symbols and column 19 should have 17 symbols. But that shouldn’t make a huge difference with the analysis, and I plan to fix it.

After posting I am going to delete the post on page 74 of the thread. Again,

So with the scytale spreadsheet, I made ten messages from Jarlve’s 100 plaintext library, used an inefficient diffusion key, and transposed into 19 columns by 18 rows so that the bigrams would line up in columns. Then I added rows 1 to 4, depending on what period I was analyzing, shifted them to the left and right, and totaled up the repeats and scores. The purpose is to try to figure out, if the 340 is a scytale transposition, whether to read the columns from left to right or from right to left.

Here is an example where I look for period 57 repeats ( 19 * 3 or period 3 untransposed ) and I shifted three rows at the bottom to the right. See repeats with symbols 22 and 45 and with symbols 16 and 47. That’s how it works.

Experiment 1: Columns read from LEFT TO RIGHT

Here is a table of statistics for ten messages. With all ten messages the columns read from left to right. If untransposed, linking the bottom of column 1 to the top of column 2 will cause the message to solve. And so on with columns 3 and 4, etc.

Row A is the number of period 19 repeats ( or matches ) before any rows are added at the bottom. Row B is the repeat probability score before rows are added at the bottom.

Compare row C with row E and compare row D with row F. BLUE shows that out of ten messages, nine of them have more repeats and higher scores when rows 1-4 are added at the bottom AND rows 1-4 at the bottom are shifted to the RIGHT. RED shows that one of the messages has more repeats and higher scores when rows 1-4 are added at the bottom AND rows 1-4 at the bottom are shifted to the LEFT.

So with experiment 1, the spreadsheet was able to figure out that the columns read from left to right 9 out of 10 times with randomly generated messages that have statistics similar to the 340.

Experiment 2: Columns read from RIGHT TO LEFT

Compare row C with row E and compare row D with row F. BLUE shows that out of ten messages, four of them have more repeats and higher scores when rows 1-4 are added at the bottom AND rows 1-4 at the bottom are shifted to the RIGHT ( instead of LEFT like the message is written ). RED shows that six of the messages have more repeats and higher scores when rows 1-4 are added at the bottom AND rows 1-4 at the bottom are shifted to the LEFT ( like the message is written ).

With experiment 2, the spreadsheet was able to figure out that the columns read from right to left only 6 out of ten times.

RED in the 340 column suggests that maybe the 340 columns read from right to left.

A lot more work could be done in this department, and I am planning on staying with scytale for a while longer. Maybe explore column re-arrangement with a practice message to see what happens. But I am also thinking about trying to figure out a way to use the bigram repeats to determine the direction of the plaintext.

Jarlve,

Now I have to ask, and we talked about this briefly before when you worked on solving smokie17 that I made for you with 55 diagonal fragments.

You were able to find some contextual words in smokie17:

T H E R I B S A N D T E R R O R S
I N T H E W H A L E A R C H E D O
V E R M E A D I S M A L G L O O M
W H I L E A L L G O D S S U N L I
T W A V E S R O L L E D B Y A N D
L I F T M E D E E P E N I N G D O
W N T O D O O M I S A W T H E O P
E N I N G M A W O F H E L L W I T
H E N D L E S S P A I N S A N D S
O R R O W S T H E R E W H I C H N
O N E B U T T H E Y T H A T F E E
L C A N T E L L O H I W A S P L U
N G I N G T O D E S P A I R I N B
L A C K D I S T R E S S I C A L L
E D M Y G O D W H E N I C O U L D
S C A R C E B E L I E V E I M M
I N E H E B O W E D H I S E A R T
O M Y C O M P L A I N T S N O M O
R E T H E W H A L E D I D M E C O
N F I N E W I T H S P E E D H E F

carsinthesttodoab
ianicouldshancebe
lievawholaintsnaw
holeorchenathenew
hichalledbydownle
allgodtheythatcwt
hisasclunggodsher
iesheaneoftorthen
slesforclastresee
ssunlitinsorgetin
gdamainitrdsanfld
loomwhathewhardte
rnforsitewestiona
thsmedintressiehi
mbledismeherowedh
edovertelloheamen
ardrmofethefitsao
chellwalofthnoteb
utwavesfallscanbe
adinboardtoseneel

Then I started with row shuffling.

See: viewtopic.php?f=81&t=2617&hilit=fragment&start=630,

I have tried 19 fragments before, it is not a problem.

You tried to arrange what would be the same as 19 scytale columns into 19 rows and the 340 didn’t solve, is that correct? Were your efforts totally fruitless?

I was thinking about pursuing scytale in more depth, and I have some ideas about it that would explain why 19 columns x 18 rows before re-drafting in 17 x 20, and why there are so many period 18 bigrams in the "first" few rows of the message that have symbols that match period 19 bigrams in the remainder of the message.

This may sound crazy, but consider this:

1. He knew that he had between 324 and 340 plaintext, and wanted to make his original scytale message into as close to a square as possible. He drafted the plaintext vertically in 19 columns – 18 rows, and the message was a few plaintext short of 340. Then he re-drafted it into 17 x 20, making a lot of period 19 repeats.

In this way, if the scytale message would have hypothetically been 15 columns by 14 rows to start with, then there would be a high count of period 15 repeats. Or if the message would have hypothetically been 27 columns by 28 rows to start with, there would be a high count of period 27 repeats. Even if re-drafted into 17 columns.

The whole period 19 thing is so confounding. Why 19 I keep asking myself. But with this method, there wouldn’t be a conscious decision to use 19. It just turned out that way because he used 18 rows. Even if he wasn’t aiming at making a square and the scytale message was 18 rows by 35 columns, then there would have been a lot of period 35 repeats after re-drafting it 17 x 20. Perhaps 18 rows fit on the paper nicely when he first drafted it. The point is that with scytale, the odd choice of 19 would not have been a choice at all.

2. He put the circle-cross symbol at the bottom of the page for a purpose. To make us think that the message is right – side up instead of upside – down. It is a ruse.

3. Because the original message was EDIT: 340 symbols or one or two symbols short of 340, the * top * few rows of the message have those period 18 bigrams with symbols that match the period 19 bigrams in the remainder of the message.

EDIT: 4. The above scytale column right to left or left to right analysis shows that the 340 columns, if scytale, may read from right to left. Making the message upside down would explain this as well. Upside down, they would read left to right.

I may make a message to emulate this, probably absent flipping it upside down.

I have your new program, and it works better now with the inputs of the 1.txt etc. Before for some reason I was having problems. But it works very cleanly now. Thanks.